


Are You Grateful?

by Lauren (notalwaysweak)



Category: Saw (Movies)
Genre: Additional Warnings Apply, Community: kink_bingo, Other, Warning: Self-Injury
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-17
Updated: 2013-08-17
Packaged: 2017-12-23 19:03:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 563
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/929986
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/notalwaysweak/pseuds/Lauren
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Written for the 'guns/blades' square for Kink Bingo 2013. Solo Amanda, mild depiction of self-injury.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Are You Grateful?

**Author's Note:**

> Saw characters do not belong to me and I am not making any money from this work of fan fiction.
> 
> Beta credit to queerlyobscure <333
> 
> * * *

Sometimes Amanda slips. Sometimes she outright stumbles and falls and even John’s presence in the next room isn’t enough to catch her. Like now, with the knife already against her thigh and digging in before she can even stop to ask herself what the hell she’s doing.

It hurts and it heals and he’ll never understand that.

She can feel the blade’s edge now. There are times when she can’t, when it’s just the instrument that draws blood and brings pain but she doesn’t actually feel it happening, just the aftermath. She looks down and feels almost surprised that there’s a red line on her pale skin.

Then she presses down and deeper and watches the line shatter open, blood welling up from it and trickling over her fingers as she holds her flesh taut. There’s a shudder from deeper inside her; she doesn’t always feel that, but it seems this time is one of those times where pain blurs the boundary into pleasure.

Amanda sets the knife aside and presses the bunched fingertips of her left hand against her cleft, the splayed fingertips of her right hand against the blood-seeping wound on her thigh. She is walking the boundary, tipping herself back and forth between the pleasure and the pain. Her breathing quickens. Her right hand claws into her thigh, blood running between her fingers, soaking them faster than the fingers of her left hand.

Faster, but not by much.

She can hear voices from the next room, but not what they are saying. She isn’t sure that she wants to know what they’re saying, any more than they would want to know what she’s doing here, in her solitude, in her self-imposed trap.

There may be more than one way out of this one, but for the moment there’s only one that she can see.

Closing her eyes, heedless of the risk of being discovered, Amanda works her fingers harder against herself, in both places. After a moment or two her right hand steals away from her thigh, finds the knife, grips the blade. Now, except for the sliver-sharp sting against her palm, she can’t tell which slickness is blood and which is not.

John’s voice raises, calling her name, and it’s the catalyst that merges pain and pleasure. She bites down on her lip, stifling a cry, and for a few bright seconds the world melts away, overcome by the heat radiating from between her legs and from her red right hand.

Cleaning up is a necessary chore made easier by the array of alcoholic wipes that she keeps at hand at all times, considering her current role as nurse. Their touch makes her skin tingle along the same boundary. She sits for a few seconds longer, riveted by the blossoming red roses on the damp tissue.

Then she bandages her thigh and hand briskly, considers a cover story, and then yanks her jeans back up without coming up with anything particularly plausible. Skintight mere weeks ago, the jeans hang from her hips now, but they won’t slip enough to expose the dressing, and if he asks about her hand, she’ll – well, she doesn’t know what she’ll do, but she’s riding on something beyond adrenaline now and has herself mostly convinced that it doesn’t matter.

Taking a deep breath, Amanda squares her shoulders and returns to the makeshift hospital room.


End file.
